"It’s a new year and a fresh new look for American Airlines as the company today unveils a new logo and exterior for its planes, including the already delivered Flagship Boeing 777-300ER aircraft set to fly on Jan. 31. In addition, American plans to continue taking delivery of new planes this year as part of its historic orders for 550 new aircraft. The unveiling of the new logo and livery is the latest step forward in American’s ongoing journey toward building a more modern travel experience for its customers. For details, please read the full release.
American Eagle and the AAdvantage® program also will get a new look as of today. The first American Eagle plane will fly the new livery beginning in February. Updating the new look across American’s network is a long process and will be rolled out over time to the airline’s airports, interiors and exteriors of aircraft, new uniforms, products and services, and technology platforms like AA.com and the American mobile apps.
American’s new look was created with input from our customers and our people, and in partnership with FutureBrand – a leading global brand consultancy. In addition, American today launches a new advertising campaign designed to showcase the new look. The advertising campaign was developed with agency partner McCann Worldgroup."
Image and press release courtesy American Airlines.
Once again, "The Travel Insider" sums it up best:
ReplyDeleteA (re)painted Rose by (the same) Name
What do you do when your airline is bankrupt and you are trying all you can to extract concessions from creditors, suppliers, and staff, while simultaneously countenancing a possible merger with another airline?
And what do you do if you’re an airline, desperate to save every pound – every ounce – on your planes, in the interest of better fuel economy and lower costs? You’ve already cut back on in-flight magazines, in-flight drink inventories, even in-flight pillows and blankets, all in the name of saving weight.
Well, if you are American Airlines, what you do is change your planes’ livery. Even though there’s (in my opinion) a much better than 50% chance that you’ll merge/be bought out by another carrier within the year (AA’s senior executives have clearly changed their tune and now are gently introducing the concept of a future merger/buy out), you spend untold millions of dollars developing a new logo and livery and repainting your planes in a design that might only be in use for a year or less.
Oh – and as for the weight saving. If you’re American, you abandon your former distinctive unpainted plane concept that for years had been something you boasted about as a weight saving measure, and instead weigh your planes down with the better part of an additional ton of extra paint by painting their fuselages a silver color designed to look very similar to – hmmm – the former unpainted color.
Just think about that for a minute. You switch from unpainted planes that save weight and money, to painting planes almost the same color as they formerly were when unpainted. That is a good idea how?
Here is some of the vomit-inducing nonsense spouted by AA in support of their brain-fart. Chief Commercial Officer Virasb Vahidi said, without any apparent sign of the embarrassment you’d expect would unavoidably be associated with such a statement :
‘ Our new logo and livery are designed to reflect the passion for progress and the soaring spirit, which is uniquely American. Our core colors — red, white and blue – have been updated to reflect a more vibrant and welcoming spirit. The new tail, with stripes flying proudly, is a bold reflection of American’s origin and name. And our new flight symbol, an updated eagle, incorporates the many icons that people have come to associate with American, including the ‘A’ and the star.’
American says that its new 787s will need to be painted because you can’t have bare carbon-fiber fuselages the same way you can with aluminum. Maybe that is so, but why not repaint only the 787s to ‘mock aluminum’ color, rather than also painting all the actual aluminum planes to make them look liked unpainted aluminum in color too?
Butt-Ugly tail, OK fuselage. Should have kept the AA logo in one form or another. Embarrassing waste of money for very little return.
ReplyDelete